Imaginary

Fictional Narratives

Neal Stephenson has written “funny and erudite novels, which are packed with so many different kinds of information, they sometimes scarcely feel like novels at all.”

• Readme: A Novel (HarperCollins Publishers, 2011), is “a book-shaped IV bag from which plot flows.”
• Anthem: A Novel (William Morrow, 2008)
• Interface: A Novel (Spectra, 2005) [co-authored with J. Frederick George]
• Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Volume I) (William Morrow, 2004)
• The Confusion (The Baroque Cycle, Volume II) (William Morrow, 2005)
• The System of the World (The Baroque Cycle, Volume III) (William Morrow, 2005)
• Cryptonomicon: A Novel (Avon, 2002)
• Snow Crash: A Novel (Turtleback, 2000)
• The Diamond Age, or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer (Spectra, 1995)

Works by other authors:

• Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things: A Novel (Viking, 2013): a novel about a 19th-century botanist “whose hunger for explanations carries her through the better part of Darwin’s century. . . . a story of the Enlightenment, when people first thought to look to the natural world for life’s explanations, rather than to human-centric creation stories of an earth-anchored universe. . . .”

Poetry

• Walter de la Mare, “The Listeners”
• Roald Dahl, “Television”

Music: Composers, artists, and major works

Peter Serkin was a classical pianist who was known to be constantly searching and questioning. “Like many who came of age in the 1960s, he questioned the establishment, both in society at large and within classical music.” Pianist Simone Dinnerstein said of him: “The most important lesson I took from my studies with Peter Serkin was that he didn't think there was one answer to the question of how to interpret a score. He was thoughtful and questioning and didn't rely on received wisdom. The lessons were investigations into the music that we made together, and by doing that he taught me how to be an independent thinker, and to be brave about following the path wherever the music led me.” Composer Ned Rorem wrote: “Serkin’s uniqueness lies, as I hear it, in a friendly rather than over-awed approach to the classics, which nonetheless plays with the care and brio that is in the family blood, and he’s not afraid to be ugly. He approaches contemporary music with the same depth as he does the classics, and he is unique among the superstars in that he approaches it at all.” Here is a link to Serkin’s playlists. 

Intermittently meditative and active, intermittently serious and joyful, César Franck’s Symphony in D Minor, M 48 (1888) (approx. 36-44’), expresses a core idea in Humanism. “. . . the listener who surrenders to the emotional elements in Franck’s music is drawn into a universe of yearning and questing, of searching and seeking.” Here is a list of recorded performances. Top audio recordings are conducted by Mengelberg in 1940, Furtwängler in 1945, Munch in 1956, Beecham in 1959, Paray in 1959, Monteux in 1961, Maazel in 1961, Ormandy in 1961, Stokowski in 1970, Bernstein in 1981, Dutoit in 1990. 

Claude Debussy, Jeux (Poème Dansé), L. 126 (1912) (approx. 16-19’), is an orchestral work and ballet, ostensibly about a simple subject matter but mysterious musically and obscure in meaning. Debussy described it as follows: “There is a park, a tennis court; there is a chance meeting of two girls and a young man seeking a lost ball; a nocturnal landscape, and a suggestion of something sinister in the darkening shadows.” The scenario for the ballet specifies: “The artificial light of the large electric lamps suggests the idea of childish play: they play hide and seek, they quarrel. The night is warm, the sky bathed in a pale light; they embrace. This spell is broken when another tennis ball mysteriously appears. Surprised and alarmed, the young man and the girls disappear into the nocturnal depths of the garden.” Watching the ballet, we see the young man being intrigued by the two young women. Top recorded performances are conducted by Haitink in 1979, Boulez in 1994, Nott in 2018, and de Sabata in 1947. 

Other works:

• Franz Schubert, String Quartet No. 9 in G minor, D 173 (1815) (approx. 24-25’): “. . . notice the adventurous and freewheeling modulation between keys. Listen to the way the first movement’s brief development section pulls us, suddenly, into a terrifying new world of haunting mystery.”
• György Kurtág, Kafka Fragments (Kafka-Fragmente), Op. 24 (1986) (approx. 52-61’), “centers on the archetypal theme of wandering, the seeking of a path that remains profoundly elusive. Certain of the trenchant texts extracted by Kurtág from Kafka’s diaries and letters call into question or even deny the very existence of such a path, or Weg. Yet for Kurtág as for Schubert, the need to keep searching for the elusive goal is inescapable, an existential necessity.” Excellent performances are by Csengery & Keller in 1987, Komsi & Oramo in 1995, Banse & Keller in 2006, Melzer & Stark in 2015, and Prohaska & Faust in 2022.
• James Willey, String Quartet No. 7 (2000) (approx. 20’): In the opening movement, the cello explores variations on a theme as the higher voices hover over him. The remainder of the work consists of a “Slow” second movement and a “Fast” third movement. The entire work can be seen as an extended intellectual and spiritual journey.
• Alfred Schnittke, Concerto for Choir (1985) (approx. 40-44’’): “The concerto’s four movements each find a different balance between the contemplative and the dramatic.”
• Hans Abrahamsen, Schnee (Snow): Canons for nine instruments (2008) (approx. 54’). Abrahamsen explains: “The guideline or rule for the canons is very simple: We start out with an answering Vorsatz, followed by a questioning Nachsatz. Throughout the time of the piece, these two are intertwined more and more, as more and more dicht geführt [tightly composed] canons, until, at the end, they are interchanged. Now the question and then the answer. The two canons are identical like a painting in two versions, but with different colors. And where the first one does not include the space, the second one does, as well as containing more canonical traces.”
• Ondřej Adámek, “Where Are You?” (2020) (approx. 35’): “In the eleven-part, approximately 35-minute-long kaleidoscope of sound, dominated by constant motoric movement – ranging from everyday sounds such as the monotonous ticking of a clock to the sweeping, electrifyingly rhythmic pounding of the orchestra tutti – the composer embarks on a search for the human ('Where do we come from and where are we going?') and the divine.”
• Malcolm Dedman, Piano Sonata No. 2, “In Search” (1984) (approx. 16’) 

Albums:

• Barre Phillips, “Quest” (13’), from the album “End to End” (2018)
• Peter Knight & Australian Art Orchestra, “Crossed and Recrossed” (2021) (38’): “. . . Peter Knight and the Australian Art Orchestra challenge the nature of music making and seek to explore and extend compositional boundaries in unexpected and surprisingly beautiful ways.” “Were we ever really here?”
• Adam Bałdych & Leszek Możdżer, “Passacaglia” (2024) (61’): “Two of Poland’s most accomplished musicians at one with the art of spontaneous improvisation here create their own musical genre to create their own space. Rather than being limited by the terms jazz and classical music, they dip into both with a spirit of enquiry and no little adventure to see where they end up.”

Music: songs and other short pieces

Visual Arts

• Gustave Courbet, The White Sail (1877)

Film and Stage